Implementing an ontology-based knowledge management system in the Korean financial firm environment

This paper reports one part of a larger research project that designs and implements an ontology‐based knowledge management system which makes knowledge assets intelligently accessible to Korean financial firms. The research develops an ontology model consisting of an information ontology, a competency ontology, a product ontology, and a knowledge map. This paper introduces the ontology model by illustrating the four components and reports on the implementation and evaluation of the information ontology for the searching of web resources. Based on the content analysis of eight international bank web sites, a pilot system of information ontology for web resources consisting of Publication, Project, Member, Person, and Organization was constructed. The pilot system includes databases and ontology‐based search engines. To evaluate the pilot system, a comparative experiment was conducted in which the performance of an ontology‐based system was compared with that of web search engines. The results indicate that the ontology‐based system can be used not only to improve precision but also to reduce search time.